Quote of the day: “A study on guerrilla warfare in Iraq by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), a Washington think-tank, blames bad planning by the US administration and the low priority given to ‘conflict termination’ and nation-building strategies by the Pentagon.
“CSIS military specialist Anthony Cordesman says the US has not learned the lessons of past conflicts, that ‘even the best military victories cannot win the peace.’ He writes: ‘Unless this situation changes soon, and radically, the United States may end up fighting a third Gulf war against the Iraqi people . . . It is far from clear that the United States can win this kind of asymmetric war.'” (Charles Clover, U.S. warned it faces ‘third Gulf war’ in Iraq, Financial Times,)
Iraq as “the hump” we need to get over: One advantage of having being part of the “Vietnam generation” is that when you hear government and military figures talking about “progress” or “solid gains” or ever more successful offensives taking place somewhere just beyond our media sight, you tend to think twice. Here’s a typical upbeat tale — from Thomas E. Ricks of the Washington Post — part of a series of upbeat assessments in our press that, along with “tightening noose” pronouncements about Saddam, followed the deaths of his two sons (U.S. Adopts Aggressive Tactics on Iraqi Fighters).
Ricks, citing interviews with many “soldiers and officers,” reports that as guerrilla strikes increased in the “Sunni Triangle,” the Army adopted “a more nimble approach,” and “found new ways to gather intelligenceThousands of suspected Iraqi fighters were detained over the six-week period, many temporarily, in hundreds of U.S. military raids, most of them conducted in the dead of night. In the expansive region north of Baghdad more than 300 Iraqi fighters were killed in combat operations, the military officials said. In the same period, U.S. forces in all of Iraq have suffered 39 combat deaths.Despite their losses, Army officers and soldiers asserted that they are making solid gains in this region.”
Claiming a decrease by half in attacks in the Sunni Triangle, Rick’s military informants sound a fabulously upbeat note: “That decrease is leading senior commanders here to debate whether the war is nearly over. Some say the resistance by members of Hussein’s Baath Party is nearly broken. ‘I think we’re at the hump’ now, a senior Central Command official said. ‘I think we could be over the hump fairly quickly’ — possibly within a couple of months, he added.”
Anybody from the Vietnam era will recognize this style of “light at the end-of-the-tunnel-ism.” (Note, by the way, something seldom mentioned in the daily accounts of American casualties — far larger numbers of Iraqis are dying, by this account at the 10 to 1 ratios that are reasonably typical but at the low end of “asymmetrical” guerrilla wars of this sort.) But let’s consider some other reports of events in the region that don’t emanate from American official circles, who have, let’s remember, been anything but accurate about how things have so far developed either in Iraq or in Washington.
Syed Saleem Shahzad of the Asia Times, who clearly has other “intelligence sources,” reports in part (Anti-US resistance spreads through Iraq):
“CSIS military specialist Anthony Cordesman says the US has not learned the lessons of past conflicts, that ‘even the best military victories cannot win the peace.’ He writes: ‘Unless this situation changes soon, and radically, the United States may end up fighting a third Gulf war against the Iraqi people . . . It is far from clear that the United States can win this kind of asymmetric war.'” (Charles Clover, U.S. warned it faces ‘third Gulf war’ in Iraq, Financial Times,)
Iraq as “the hump” we need to get over: One advantage of having being part of the “Vietnam generation” is that when you hear government and military figures talking about “progress” or “solid gains” or ever more successful offensives taking place somewhere just beyond our media sight, you tend to think twice. Here’s a typical upbeat tale — from Thomas E. Ricks of the Washington Post — part of a series of upbeat assessments in our press that, along with “tightening noose” pronouncements about Saddam, followed the deaths of his two sons (U.S. Adopts Aggressive Tactics on Iraqi Fighters).
Ricks, citing interviews with many “soldiers and officers,” reports that as guerrilla strikes increased in the “Sunni Triangle,” the Army adopted “a more nimble approach,” and “found new ways to gather intelligenceThousands of suspected Iraqi fighters were detained over the six-week period, many temporarily, in hundreds of U.S. military raids, most of them conducted in the dead of night. In the expansive region north of Baghdad more than 300 Iraqi fighters were killed in combat operations, the military officials said. In the same period, U.S. forces in all of Iraq have suffered 39 combat deaths.Despite their losses, Army officers and soldiers asserted that they are making solid gains in this region.”
Claiming a decrease by half in attacks in the Sunni Triangle, Rick’s military informants sound a fabulously upbeat note: “That decrease is leading senior commanders here to debate whether the war is nearly over. Some say the resistance by members of Hussein’s Baath Party is nearly broken. ‘I think we’re at the hump’ now, a senior Central Command official said. ‘I think we could be over the hump fairly quickly’ — possibly within a couple of months, he added.”
Anybody from the Vietnam era will recognize this style of “light at the end-of-the-tunnel-ism.” (Note, by the way, something seldom mentioned in the daily accounts of American casualties — far larger numbers of Iraqis are dying, by this account at the 10 to 1 ratios that are reasonably typical but at the low end of “asymmetrical” guerrilla wars of this sort.) But let’s consider some other reports of events in the region that don’t emanate from American official circles, who have, let’s remember, been anything but accurate about how things have so far developed either in Iraq or in Washington.
Syed Saleem Shahzad of the Asia Times, who clearly has other “intelligence sources,” reports in part (Anti-US resistance spreads through Iraq):
“Intelligence sources in the northern city of Sulaimaniya say that those resisting the US presence are on a steep learning curve and that their attacks will become more organized and ruthless… There has been a dramatic increase in attacks against US forces, and casualties, in the past few days. Intelligence officials believe that the failure of US troops to apprehend the attackers is due to the lack of a local intelligence network.”
But his true warning has to do with the Shia south:
“Since US President George W Bush declared the end of the war, anti-US resistance has taken on new faces. Trained Republican Guards and fedayeen have regrouped, and Sunni Islamic groups have formed circles of resistance. So far, the Shi’ites have been watching and waiting. However, the emergence of a figure like [young cleric] Moqtada Sadr reveals that there are many ambitious men in the southern region who have big obsessions and designs and they are growing in appeal in the Shi’ite community.
“Once an anti-US trend takes root in southern Iraq, the security of US troops will be seriously in question. This is the most haunting question now confronting the US forces in Iraq.”
The Independent‘s Robert Fisk (US troops turn botched Saddam raid into a massacre), reporting on the latest botched “noose tightening,” this time in a middle class neighborhood in Baghdad where perhaps 5 passing Iraqis in cars were shot to death, sums matters up in this way, quite at variance with the self-congratulatory words out of the US military:
“Yet again, false informers, ill-trained American soldiers who appeared to exercise no fire control and a lack of military planning has created a tragedy among the people the Americans claimed to be ‘liberating’ from Saddam Hussein only 15 weeks ago.”
More “successful” operations like this and the U.S. is likely to have a full-fledged war for independence on its hands. A striking lead editorial in the Hindu gives a sense of how this situation looks to someone in “West Asia” (Death and resistance):
“Washington’s response to the Iraqi resistance suffers from a fundamental flaw. It has either swallowed its own propaganda or hopes that the people of Iraq will ignore fundamental realities. There can be no other explanation for the Bush administration’s claim that the Iraqis will eventually understand that the U.S.-U.K. occupation has a benign purpose. The vast majority of Iraqis have a diametrically opposite perception of the situation. Mr. Hussein may have been a brutal dictator with many enemies and calamitous blunders to answer for; but today the central issue before the people of Iraq is how to regain the independence and sovereignty of their nation. The U.S.-led invasion and occupation has caused death, destroyed livelihoods, disrupted health and other public services, and inflicted national humiliation. Western companies have garnered most of the oil contracts the occupying powers have handed out. The funds generated from oil sales will be used to pay the mostly western firms that have been given the contracts for reconstruction. Iraqi industry is to be privatised and since few people in Iraq have the purchasing capacity, these assets too are likely to pass into foreign hands. In short, the perception is growing in Iraq and elsewhere in West Asia that the real objective of the occupation is the systematic loot of Iraq’s national wealth.”
Having never been occupied but always the occupier, Americans have little sense of how powerful the urge to be sovereign in your own land actually is. By the way, that comment about Washington “swallowing its own propaganda” is a telling one. It’s not simply that ruling groups like ours come up with cunning strategies for the world and then propagandize their own people. First, they almost invariably propagandize each other. And in the case of our men in Washington, as I’ve been saying for so many months, we are faced with dreamers of the first order, “true believers” trying to impose fierce and destructive utopian solutions on an understandably resistant world.
George Monbiot, in a remarkable column in today’s Guardian (see below) comments: “For the hundredth time since the US invaded Iraq, the predictions made by those with access to intelligence have proved less reliable than the predictions made by those without.” He then suggests that, for our men in Washington, “America” has quite literally become a religion, that they are on a divine mission, and that, as they spread the “word” at the tip of a missile or via Predator drone and special forces teams, “[l]ike all those who send missionaries abroad, the high priests of America cannot conceive that the infidels might resist through their own free will.”
For those who want a field guide to messiahs masquerading as politicians, the best identification mark is always whether they think they own the future. Beware of those who claim to have a lock on that future and act confidently upon the kind of “knowledge” that no “intelligence community” can give any human being. (I except from this all media pundits, since much of what passes for “news” in our culture really consists of irresponsible guesses about the nature of the future by people whose job it is to do nothing but that and never act upon that knowledge — and who, in return, never have to take responsibility for their statements.)
Homeward bound, but when?
Meanwhile, while the believers believe and send our young men and women into battle to enforce those beliefs, our troops await word on when it will all end. The Air Force Times, picked up off www.antiwar.com, reports (David Wood, Troops ask, ‘How long?’ The Army can’t say):
“A generation ago, soldiers ordered to Vietnam had to stay 12 months. A generation earlier, GIs sent off to the Korean War had to earn their way home by accumulating 36 points – four points a month for combat, one point for being a rear-area cook. Today’s troops in Iraq, however, have no idea when they are coming home.”
Officers, Wood reports, are now being cycled in and out of commands, as in Vietnam, without necessary relationship to when troops are coming or going, which creates anguish in the military: “‘We learned nothing from Vietnam – changing people, particularly officers in command, in the middle of a campaign, is not a good thing,’ said Army Maj. Donald Vandergriff, a tank officer and author of a major critical study of the Army personnel system. ‘They’re only concerned with efficiency, not the impact of what they’re doing.’
“Normally, the Army requires units to train together in grueling exercises for months before deploying But with challenging missions underway in Afghanistan, Iraq and 128 other countries, it has neither the time nor the units to spare.”
And here’s a fascinating little tidbit to add to the picture — it turns out the military is trying to rotate the personnel in some units home early. Fred Kaplan of Slate reports on a small “sign” that suggests “not only that postwar Iraq is going badly but that top Bush officials, finally, know it’s going badly” (Baker to Baghdad):
“The first sign came last week in a little-noticed article in Stars and Stripes, reporting that the 3rd Infantry Division will no longer accommodate embedded reporters-or, with few exceptions, reporters period.
“Embedding was a brilliant PR gesture, designed to weave a bond of intimacy and dependency between war reporters and war fighters, but it could remain brilliant only as long as there was a good story to tell. All through Operation Iraqi Freedom, there was a good story indeed, and the embeds beamed it far, wide, and enthusiastically. (Remember CNN’s Walter Rodgers, embedded with the 3rd I.D.’s 7th Cavalry, breathlessly telling viewers how “we” broke through the defenses and took the bridge?)”
That should allow the military good news to flow in unhindered by reality.
Vacationing in Europe:
I hate to admit this administration was right about anything but, according to today’s Guardian, the first lawsuit against Tony Blair for “war crimes” in Iraq has just been filed before the International Criminal Court by the Athens Bar Association. (Helena Smith, Greeks accuse Blair of war crimes in Iraq): “The association had not brought similar charges against the American president, George Bush, because Washington had still not ratified the treaty which set up the ICC Last night legal experts said that if the court did decide to hear the case it would set a precedent that could ‘open the floodgates’ of similar actions being brought before the tribunal.”
Fortunately, the president is fond of Crawford, Texas, because sooner or later this could put a crimp in any European vacation plans for Team Washington. Though, come to think of it, Eastern Europe’s a real possibility as is East Timor with whom the administration has already hammered out bilateral agreements that no U.S. officials accused of war crimes will ever be turned over to the court. Perhaps, though, the president won’t bother to throw out the first torch at the upcoming Olympic ceremonies in Athens. But get to work guys! Every country under your belt is another future vacation spot.
Why are we in Iraq?
Paul Wolfowitz and other neocons are now advancing a fascinating new theory. Wolfowitz got on the Sunday talking heads shows and had a lot of interesting things to say. Much quoted, for instance, was his description on “Meet the Press” of the “nature of terrorism intelligence as intrinsically murky.” (To which Senator Carl Levin quipped, “”Boy, it sure didn’t sound murky before the war.”)
But far more interesting was his statement that the fighting and dying in Iraq at the moment, according to the Washington Post (Walter Pincus, Wolfowitz: Iraq Key To War on Terrorism), was “the ‘central battle’ in the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11, 2001, war on terrorism.” Wolfowitz said, in an oddly organized sentence, “”We went to war and I believe we are still fighting terrorists and terrorist supporters in Iraq in a battle that will make this country safer in the future from terrorism.”
He then labeled the Iraqis killing Americans “terrorists.” This fits with a fascinating new neocon theory, which Josh Marshall has been discussing at his weblog, that Iraq is the global “flypaper” drawing all the terrorists to one spot for what, in near biblical terms, might be termed a terrorist Armageddon.
The war in Iraq was billed, you might remember, as a matter of breaking the grip of terrorists and terrorism on a country in bondage and stepping between its weapons of mass destruction and the urge of its leader to turn them over to al Qaeda. Now it turns out the opposite argument holds. The purpose, it seems, of the Iraqi war was not to purge Iraq of its terrorists, but to draw terrorists there. Evidently the neocons like their critics now imagine that country as a quagmire, just not for the United States. Marshall offers this rejoinder:
“[I]sn’t the main fallacy that there isn’t some finite number of “terrorists” out there whom we can draw to one place, kill or arrest, and then be done with it? I mean, let’s be honest: Is there really any shortage of these dudes? Are they gonna run out?… The idea is supposed to be to drain the swamp, not create a new swamp and spend all your time swatting all the mosquitoes that come to hang out and breed.”
Note, by the way, that now that resistance is a reality of life in part of Iraq, we’re starting to blame it all on what used to be called “outside agitators.”
How did we ever get there? — the explanations continue to crumble.
And speaking of “murky intelligence,” some real reportorial work, without even the benefit of “intelligence,” is now being done on various of the far-fetched explanations for war. You might, for instance, check out at Mother Jones online Tim Dickinson’s important reconstruction of a timeline for how aluminum tubes became weapons of mass distraction here. He begins:
“The 19 words that followed the now-infamous “16 enormously overblown” ones have proved to be every bit as untrue, and the intelligence underlying the claim nearly as shoddy.
“‘Our intelligence sources tell us,’ President Bush told to the nation on January 28, ‘that he [Saddam] has attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production.’ The claim, paired with the alleged uranium buy, painted a damning picture of Baghdad’s atomic ambitions.
“The truth is far less frightening. Saddam did indeed attempt to purchase some highly-refined aluminum tubes. But they were not, as alleged by the Bush administration, to be used in a uranium-enriching centrifuge; rather they were intended to be used in the production of conventional rockets — at least according to the United Nation’s International Atomic Energy Agency, the closest thing to an impartial authority in this case.
“What’s more, this was well known at the time Bush delivered his address”
And below I include the full text of a new piece by former CIA analyst Ray McGovern on what may someday be known as Cheneygate in honor of the man who pushed the Iraqi nuclear program far longer and harder than Saddam did. Based on his deep experience with the government and the intelligence community McGovern has consistently been providing us with important pieces of this sort.
Washington increasingly looks like a house of cards — an edifice built on dreams. Keep your eye out for the first figure to go. The domino theory may turn out to work after all.
Finally, along with the Monbiot and McGovern pieces, I include another of Paul Krugman’s superlative columns from today’s New York Times where he discusses why Bush’s poll figures have remained so far above Blair’s. He considers the “fawning” nature of the American media post-9/11, but also suggests that the president may face a “terrible reckoning” in the future for taking and misusing the trust of the American people. Tom
America is a religion
US leaders now see themselves as priests of a divine mission to rid the world of its demons
By George Monbiot
The Guardian
July 29, 2003“The death of Uday and Qusay,” the commander of the ground forces in Iraq told reporters on Wednesday, “is definitely going to be a turning point for the resistance.” Well, it was a turning point, but unfortunately not of the kind he envisaged. On the day he made his announcement, Iraqi insurgents killed one US soldier and wounded six others. On the following day, they killed another three; over the weekend they assassinated five and injured seven. Yesterday they slaughtered one more and wounded three. This has been the worst week for US soldiers in Iraq since George Bush declared that the war there was over.
George Monbiot’s books Poisoned Arrows and No Man’s Land are republished this week by Green Books.
To read more Monbiot click here
Cheney Chicanery
By Ray McGovern
July 29, 2003When Vice President Dick Cheney comes out of seclusion to brand critics “irresponsible,” you know the administration is in trouble.
Cheney was enlisted to do so in the spring of 2002 amid reports that warning given to President Bush before 9/11 should have prompted preventive action. Cheney branded such commentary “irresponsible,” and critics in the press and elsewhere were duly intimidated. It will be interesting to see what happens this time.
Sifting through the congressional report on 9/11, I was reminded of the President’s Daily Brief item of August 6, 2001 titled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.” Dana Priest of the Washington Post has learned that this PDB article stated “bin Laden had wanted to conduct attacks in the United States for years and that (his) group apparently maintained a support base here.”
According to Priest, the PDB went on to cite “FBI judgments about patterns of activity consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks.” The president has cited executive privilege in refusing to declassify the PDB item.
With the administration under fire once again, the vice president came off the bench with a major statement on July 24 in which he tried to hit two birds with one speech: (1) distract attention from the highly embarrassing 9/11 report released that same day, and (2) arrest the plunge in administration credibility caused by the absence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq and the use of spurious reporting alleging that Iraq had been seeking uranium in Africa. In the words of one Cheney aide, “We had to get out of the hole we were in.”
But, alas, they have dug themselves in deeper by pushing disingenuousness to new heights-or depths. Cheney made the centerpiece of his speech a series of quotes from the key National Intelligence Estimate, “Iraq’s Continuing Programs for Weapons of Mass Destruction” published on October 1. 2002. The NIE judgments he selected were adduced to prove that Iraq posed such an urgent threat to the US that it would have been “irresponsible” to shy away from making war.
Inconveniently, experience on the ground in Iraq for more than four months now has cast great doubt on the validity of those judgments. Worse still, as Cheney knows better than anyone, it was largely the unrelenting pressure he put on intelligence analysts-for example, by his unprecedented “multiple visits” to CIA headquarters – that rendered those judgments so dubious.
Giving new meaning to chutzpah, Cheney quoted four statements from the NIE:
1. “Baghdad has chemical and biological weaponsif left unchecked, it probably will have a nuclear weapon during this decade.” Where are the chemical and biological weapons?
2. “All key aspects-the R&D, production, and weaponization-of Iraq’s offensive (biological weapons) program are active and most elements are larger and more advanced than they were before the Gulf War.” Where are they?
3. “Since inspections ended in 1998, Iraq has maintained its chemical weapons effort, energized its missile program, and invested more heavily in biological weapons; in the view of most agencies, Baghdad is reconstituting its nuclear weapons program.” Where is the evidence of this in Iraq?
4. The Intelligence Community has “high confidence” in the conclusion that “Iraq is continuing, and in some areas expanding, its chemical, biological, nuclear and missile programs contrary to UN Resolutions.”
The last four months have shown that such judgments-though stated to be marked by “high confidence”-were far off the mark. I know from my own experience that this is frequently the case when analysts are put under pressure from policymakers who have already publicly asserted, a priori, the “correct” answers to key questions.
Cheney did so in the administration’s rollout of its marketing strategy for war, when he charged in a major address on August 26, 2002 “Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons.” The intelligence community spent the subsequent weeks in a desperate search evidence to prove Cheney right. If he is looking for something to label “irresponsible in the extreme,” the extreme pressure he put on intelligence analysts last September certainly qualifies.
Cheney did not mention in his speech that analysts in the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR) insisted on recording in the NIE their strong dissent on the key nuclear issue. All signs point to their having chosen the wiser approach. Their diplomatically stated-but nonetheless biting-dissent is worth a careful read:
“The activities we have detected do not, however, add up to a compelling case that Iraq is currently pursuingan integrated and comprehensive approach to acquire nuclear weaponsINR considers available evidence inadequate to support such a judgment. Lacking persuasive evidence that Baghdad has launched a coherent effort to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program, INR is unwilling to project a time line for completion of activities it does not now see happening.”
It was also INR analysts who branded the infamous Iraq-seeking-uranium-from-Niger story (widely recognized as bogus but included in the estimate anyway) “highly dubious.” One of the ironies here is that the intelligence analysts at State, a department steeped in politics, felt more secure in speaking truth to power than their counterparts in the CIA. In my day, CIA analysts were generally given the necessary insulation from pressure from policymakers-and career protection when it was necessary to face them down.
Here the buck stops with CIA Director George Tenet. And fresh light was thrown on his remarkable malleability when Newt Gingrich (also a frequent visitor to CIA over recent months) made this gratuitous comment to ABC on July 27: “Tenet is so grateful and loyal that he will do anything he can to help President Bush.”
________________
Ray McGovern chaired NIEs and prepared/briefed the President’s Daily Brief during his 27-year career at CIA. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity and co-director of the Servant Leadership School, an inner-city outreach ministry in Washington, DC.Copyright C2003 Ray McGovern
You Say Tomato
By Paul Krugman
The New York Times
July 29, 2003Two leaders politicized intelligence to sell a war. But while one has suffered a catastrophic loss of public trust, the other hasn’t, at least not yet.
Are Tony Blair’s troubles the shape of things to come for George Bush? Or does the aftermath of the Iraq war show, once again, that we are two nations divided by a common language?
In Britain the news remains dominated by the death of Dr. David Kelly, a W.M.D. specialist who became a pawn in a vicious war between the Blair government and the BBC over claims of politicized intelligence. According to news accounts, someone in the Blair government leaked Dr. Kelly’s name as the likely source of a critical BBC report, apparently provoking his suicide.